Keynote Speaker

Anne Querrien

Anne Querrien is an urbanist and sociologist. She was one of the founding members and general secretary of CERFI (Centre for Institutional Study Research and Training), active between 1967-1987. She was also a key member of The Mouvement du 22 Mars (Movement of 22 March) during the May '68 uprisings

Her career and research has focused on the politics of the city, on social housing and educational facilities. She is member of the International Association of Technicians, Experts and Researchers (AITEC), editor of Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine and part of the editorial board for the journals Multitudes and Chimeres. Anne is also a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis.

Speakers

Tom Fielder: Ecstatic Cartographies: On the Ambiguity of Dance

Abstract:

I would like to place the question of psychosocial cartographies in relation to representations of dance as a form of ecstatic movement. If cartography entails the mapping of space, with implications that are both psychic and social in nature, dance as ‘ecstatic movement’ subverts the power of cartographic logic by manifesting an aporetic ambiguity and aliveness. I will develop an understanding of the cartographic impact of dance in relation to some of the works of French classical painter Nicolas Poussin, as recently exhibited at the National Gallery in London (Beeny and Whitlum-Cooper, 2021). Poussin’s choreographic representations of dance, in paintings such as “A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term”, introduce contradictory and ambiguous elements to his careful mapping of space. In “The Adoration of the Golden Calf” Poussin more explicitly represents the dance as an ambiguous form of ecstatic law-breaking, through which the Israelites rouse the anger of their law-giver Moses. I will explore the psychosocial implications of the apparent opposition between ecstatic movement and the law, with the help of Freud’s (1914) psychoanalytic reflections on “The Moses of Michelangelo”. The philosopher Gillian Rose (1996) uses Poussin’s painting “Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion” to question the ‘post-modern’ opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, contending that mourning “becomes the law” and is in fact integral to reason. In this context, I would like to use Poussin’s paintings to consider the political implications of ecstatic movement for psychosocial cartographies: in Rose’s terms, by pitching the dance in relation to the ongoing work of cartographic mourning.

Bio:

Tom Fielder is a PhD researcher in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck. His doctoral research engages psychoanalysis with politics, and is focused on the question of how to think about Brexit. He has published academic articles in History of the Human Sciences and the Journal of Psychosocial Studies.

Lucy Nicholson, Kerstin Wellhofer, Lynn Froggett, Hugh Ortega Breton: Facilitating Liveliness: The relationship between movement in inner and outer time-space.

Abstract

Maps were originally made to record movement and ownership in external spaces, then to guide future movements and to control mobility; asserting who controlled external space by representing it visually. Maps of geographical spaces do not incorporate internal dynamics and time-spaces, assuming that these bear no relation to the capacity and liberty to move and follow a map’s guidelines. However, we contend that the exploration of inner space dialectically increases movement in cartographic (external) time-space.

Our invitation is two-fold, to experience movement to become more aware of our inner cartography, and to reflect on the role of the dance/movement facilitator interested in expanding the movement of the confined, and those living in confined spaces; such as prisons and care settings. We propose a movement workshop facilitated by specialists in somatic practice and dance leadership, followed by a discussion on the discovery or recollection of inner time-space. The second proposal is a typical paper presentation, based on observations of a dance-forum theatre workshop in confined settings in the criminal justice, health and educational sectors; interpreted through the prism of embodied choreutics and vitality affects theory (Stern, 1985, 2004), which claims a link between infantile care experiences and rhythmic art forms. We argue that an embodied cartography of inner space (inner sphere) by facilitators with participants can lead to greater choice and expressivity in movement, greater inhabitation of personal physical space (kinesphere) and the building of a relationship with our general space and those within it, supporting the opening up of reflexivity in thought.

Bios

Lucy Nicholson is a senior lecturer and an embodied facilitation specialist. As an experienced community dance artist her work has seen her lead dance projects internationally, specifically with harder to reach communities that may have lived experience of the criminal justice or recovery systems and experience of mental health difficulties. Her work is informed by the Laban-Bartenieff Movement System with a particular interest in the liveness of the facilitative act...She's interested in the artistic and creative nature of positive, responsive dance facilitation and how returning to our own bodies as facilitators; recognising the space and effort of our movement really serves those we are in relationship with.

Kerstin Wellhofer, a registered (ismeta) somatic movement practitioner and therapist, is also lecturer and researcher in dance and somatic practices for undergraduate and post graduate studies at the University of Central Lancashire. somatic enquiry is the container for her therapeutic, creative and nature based work, informed by her work as a Body and Earth practitioner. Her work is concerned with sourcing our knowing from the body, in movement, in relationship and integral to the more than human world. Playing with language and creative expression, delving into how we learn, and being nature whilst nurturing our sense of belonging and connection, in ways that allow us to be well; inform and shape her interests.

Professor Lynn Froggett is Co-Director of the Institute for Citizenship Society and Change and the Psychosocial Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire and Executive Chair of the Association for Psychosocial Studies. Lynn’s focus is on the contribution of arts and culture to human health and welfare. Other key interests are in civic renewal and public mental health. She has led numerous collaborative research programmes in settings as diverse as health, education, criminal justice communities and the cultural sector.

Hugh Ortega Breton Ph.D. is the Senior Research Associate of the Psychosocial Research Unit, at the University of Central Lancashire. He researches the impact of socially engaged artistic practice, including how it contributes to civil renewal.

Louis Moreno: The Spatial Conjuncture of New Urbanism : King’s Cross and Tottenham

Louis Moreno’s research, teaching and writing explores the spatial relationships and political economic forces that shape the social and cultural forms of everyday life. Specialising in urbanism and spatial theory, Louis’s academic background spans literature and philosophy, architectural history, urban geography and political theory.

Louis’s PhD research examined the urban incubation and architectural effects of financialised capitalism in post-industrial Britain. His current research examines the urban processes and cultural logic of financialised capitalism. Louis is a member of the research collective freethought, who co-curated the Bergen Assembly 2016 in Norway. One day Louis hopes to publish in the Journal of Memespace Cartography.

Andrej Radman: Metropolitan Meta-Modelling

Abstract

The paper will provide a cartography of ecological exchanges and modifications of states akin to the Stengerian ‘relaying’ operations. It is just as difficult to define an operation, as it is to define a structure, other than by example. The example comes from Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978) read through Felix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989). The paper will be based on Guattari’s diagram of the Fourfold that is not a structuralist synoptic model, but a machinic synaptic meta-model, which surveys the singularities at play. This is no longer the ontic world of simple mereological relations, but the synaptic or mereotopological world of transformations, events and occurrences. Guattari’s four ‘unconsciousnesses’ are: existential territories; incorporeal universes of value; energetic-semiotic flows and abstract machinic phyla. The Fourfold will help us grasp the dynamic unity of the Metropolis as an open system without identity, as operation and structure at the same time. The ‘whole’ here is not of the parts but alongside them. It comes with an important caveat: architectural technicity is, from the beginning, pharmacological. The event that is existence can be understood as a continuous temporal permutation linking and transforming the four functors (remedy). Any attempt to freeze the cycle into a structure of fixed relations, or guide it along a predetermined and repetitive path, will lead to the condition of domination (poison). Thinking ecologically implies a shift away from conceiving an assemblage solely in terms of a zero-sum game. An assemblage encompasses plasticity, or a variation of the means of bringing about an end; protention, or coordinating ongoing modulation with emerging states of affairs; and retention, or coordinating ongoing modulation with prior states of affairs.

Bio

Andrej Radman has been teaching design and theory courses at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment since 2004. A graduate of the Zagreb School of Architecture in Croatia, he is a licensed architect and recipient of the Croatian Architects Association Annual Award for Housing Architecture in 2002. Radman received his master’s and doctoral degrees from TU Delft and joined the Architecture Philosophy and Theory group as assistant professor in 2008. He is an editor of the peer-reviewed journal for architecture theory Footprint. His research focuses on new-materialist ecologies and radical empiricism. Radman’s latest publication is Ecologies of Architecture: Essays on Territorialisation (EUP, 2021).

Anandit Sachdev: Auroville: Landscapes of Life, Living and Being

Auroville, a settlement in Tamil Nadu, India is based on the principles of ‘human unity’ as defined by Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo. The settlement was conceptualized on these principles by Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual partner Mirra Alfassa, known as ‘The Mother’ to the Aurovillians. In common perception, the settlement is an experiment in achieving ‘human unity’ through sustainable living. Since its inception in late 1960s, the settlement has attracted people from a variety of nationalities, each understanding, seeking and rendering ‘human unity’ in their own unique way. This multiplicity of inhabitation has created and continues to create complex and layered human and more-thanhuman geographies which are collectively understood as Auroville.

This essay builds on these multiple narratives of local metaphysical and every inhabitation of spiritual and philosophical ideas of Sri Aurobindo as rendered in materiality by the Mother. The research aims to assess how these forms of everyday spirituality conflict, interact and engage with the principles of Auroville. The research further aims to understands how, if at all, the diverse landscapes of social, cultural, and infrastructural conflicts synthesize when perceived through the lens of spirituality.

The research does so by detailing the different forms of built environment which evoke the transcendental and its underlying processes. While doing so, it aims to understand how different manifestations of interiority within the Aurovillian landscape tie back to the self and its entanglements. By analysing the settlement through a spiritual lens, the research ultimately ties together questions relating to the built environment and ontology and asks how each facilitates a continuous synthesis with the other. Lastly, the paper enquires if these ongoing processes of synthesis of built space and ontological entanglements are what can be conceptualized as ‘human unity’ as perceived by Sri Aurobindo himself.

Bio

Anandit Sachdev teaches design and making as an Assistant Professor at Jindal School of Art and Architecture, O.P Jindal University, India. He is also an electronic music producer and is interested in questions of contemporary sonic landscapes of India and their relationship with sacrality.

Lita Crociani-Windland: A psychosocial mapping of political architecture- La Siege du PCF/Espace Niemeyer

La Siege du PCF, now also known as Espace Niemeyer, is an iconic building in Paris designed by world famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the 1960s to be the new French Communist Party HQ. A team made up of an architect, an artist, a psychosocial researcher and a psychotherapist have taken this building as a case study for an innovative framing of architecture as a psychosocial subject affected by and affecting of the human psyche and the social environment at both conscious and unconscious levels. The research has involved a number of different types of mapping: mapping previous ownership and uses of the site; mapping key influences and significant figures and events. Some of the influences regard memories of distant places and cultures coming into a Parisian setting and inscribed into the architecture of the site as a whole. The case study was aimed at testing different ways of researching the affective interaction between people and architecture including unconscious aspects, to provide tools for design and repurposing of buildings - that may help both design and adaptation at a time that when many buildings are no longer serving the function they were built for.

Authors details:

Lita Crociani-Windland - senior lecturer Sociology and Psychosocial Studies, University of the West of England, Association for Psychosocial Studies board member, Co-chair Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society

Jonathan Mosley - conceptual artist/architect (Warren and Mosley), Associate Professor of Architecture and Experimental Practice University of the West of England

Sophie Warren - conceptual artist (Warren and Mosley)

Nigel Williams - Research Fellow, University of the West of England and psychotherapist in private practice

Chad Frazier: EASE of MAGIC

"Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space… where each can move freely…" -Agamben, The Coming Community

In a neighborhood that has experienced over a hundred years of dispossession and neglect, objects suddenly move. The shifting decay of structural collapse; the unsettling detour of sinkholes; the sudden seasonal overgrowth of abandonment -- invite the resident to drift through paths of least resistance. Like a non-Euclidean architecture, one can/not go back the same way they arrived. In an uncanny alley, you cross paths with a resemblance and stop short of where you are going.

Yet, living here, you still know the name of everything you encounter.

This paper will consist of maps and drawings tucked into a critical essay, wielded as a book of spells. Taking the summer's neighborhood projects, embarked on with resident children, to reveal our enchanted geography. Starting this Spring, we are reading and performing Ursala K. LeGuin's Earthsea series, introducing the magic of knowing a thing’s "true name". Using incantations to name the "overgrowth" as edible and herbal species. Gaggled together like a coven, we collectively draw maps of the vacant lots that we have renamed "Nota-lot,” “Camelot,” etc. Like a sacred geometry, building a maze out of raised beds. Transporting ourselves to the labyrinth of the 19th-Century Utopian communities outside of town. “Heterotopia” is our "true name". As a historically multiracial area this is a "place of difference" challenging that history of Utopian perfection that advanced parallel with racial purity. Our practices will defy the law of gravity – almost, with a treehouse. Resurrecting Constant Nieuwenhuy's imagination and the spirit of eco defense tree-sits. We will name the place where the police and fire department burned down a community of over 100 shantyboats, and build tiny replicas for our pond. We will build a fort -- from which to learn the alchemy of turning streets into playgrounds, and another detritus-strewn summer into golden memories.

For this paper I will be engaging Ursala K. LeGuin's work, and Jorge Borges'; the urbanists Nils Norman, Richard Sennett, Marrikka Trotter; and drawing from the discourse of Speculative Realism.

Bio:

After moving every six months while working on the railroad, Chad Frazier settled in Southern Indiana in 2008 to start collectively owned housing. While fighting city code and development, he found a power in the long history of anarchist urban studies, and continues to do so.

Felix and Sabastian Birch: Mapping Waste

This paper challenges the notion that waste is a neutral terrain or simply “matter out of place”, using spatial enquiries to show that such a ubiquitous definition is built upon colonial logic and operates as commodity fetishism. An interdisciplinary approach has been formed using nursing and engineering perspectives to this end. The first case study follows a mental health practitioner negotiating their ward. Nursing, or more specifically mental health nursing, can be conceptualised as the management of waste. Those who are not deemed to be productive for Capital- those who do not produce, those with a psychosis, or children with emotional disturbances enough to be aesthetically unappealing to Capital, will be warehoused. In these warehouses, or institutions, the nurse will manage the waste. This will be through regimes of daily activities, psychosocial interventions, medication, and physical restraint. This paper will map a ward, problematise its spaces, and critique the technics of mental health care in late Capital as waste management. Technics in this paper will be understood as the mechanics, techniques, and systems of thought that guide action in the two fields of Waste management: engineering and nursing. Waste in this context is by no means considered a pejorative; as the accompanying case study highlights, Waste is a mode of late Capital commodity fetishism. A genealogy of the West Lothian shale bings is made from their representations in newspapers, industrial reports, and artistic reimaginings. Shearing away the temptation to imagine them as a blank medium for temporal processes reveals a socially produced space, or spatiality, which in turn shapes the shaper. The two investigations work in tandem to show how the typical definition of Waste as a negative spatial relation (out of place) poses Waste as incidental to production, and thus serves to obscure commodity production by hiding its consequences. This interdisciplinary approach is then applied to psycho-socially map spaces that tend to be thought of as without history or significance. Back-alleys, side streets, and causeways become hidden theatres, exposing a castrametation that is performed by aesthetic judgements inseparable from colonial imaginations of “pure Nature” and the idea of the human. In this way the cartography of waste incites judgements that might be suppressed in more explicit spaces of production. At once revealing how Capital manifests in banal commentary upon litter, it also heightens the power of the artist in the reimagination of shapes, the terraforming of landscapes, and the transvaluation of values.

Bios

Felix completed his masters in Civil Engineering at Edinburgh University. He is now hoping to investigate the philosophical groundings of engineering practice.

Sebastian Birch (RN, FHEA) is a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing

Thomas Mical: Schizoanalytic Cartographies of Hyper-Desire Architecture

This essay takes an oblique strategy of analysis of the spatialization of desiring-production theory couplet as a means to come to some understanding of a possible schizoanalytic cartography (Guattari)possible – by turning to the retrospective publications of Constant Nieuwenhuys “New Babylon” project for an aleatory deterritorilization of Amsterdam, identified as a field condition of hyper-desire,. Architecture and urbanism, as superstructures and delirium call for a “psychic realism” and here we will highlight the overlaps of the mental ecology and urban ecology in motion. We will highlight the spatialized desires and the dream of smooth spaces and aleatory devices in the free-flux-flow imagined super-environment to get to a better understanding of this incomplete intellectual project of schizoanalytic cartographies. Then we will twin this scanning process with elements of designed open-flow-spaces in this visionary architecture of the 1970s. From here we will seek to clarify some techniques of extending schizoanalytic cartographies by recalling the mobile sections of subjectivity slices in the legacy of the psychogeogrphy of the Situationists, filtered through the lens of the desiring-production couplet. Attention is on the infra-disciplinary modes of cognitive mapping between psychogeography and Schizoanalysis to take us this “psychic realism” of lived intensity situated as an experiential nomadology where mental structures and physical structures are converged and then subordinated to the possibility of trajectories of freedom.

Michael N. Goddard: ‘I Keep a Room at the Hospital’: Towards a Cartography of Emo Topoi

Emo is a particularly slippery term operating as something other than a genre and more as a tendency or mode of various punk related forms of popular music towards confessional personal expression and emotional catharsis. Taking place largely in North America from the 1980s to the 2000s, one approach to mapping emo would be literally geographical, mapping both how these groups emerged in specific regional locations like New Jersey, Long Island, San Diego or various towns in Florida, as well as being largely developing in small towns or suburban locations rather than established centres of punk scenes like New York or Los Angeles.

This paper will take a more abstract approach to emo cartographies, identifying several emo topoi or virtual spaces, themes and events (see Huhtamo, 2011), around which emo lyrics, music and performances have circulated. These include the basement, the hospital, the diary, the car crash, the funeral, the mall and the MySpace page; they operate on different levels of abstraction and refer to different aspects of the music scene.

Car accidents, hospitals and funerals are topoi as themes that can be found largely in lyrics as well as music videos, as in the Jawbreaker song ‘Accident Prone' that refers to both car crashes that might actually lead to hospitalisation as well as similarly destructive relationships, an overlaying that is definitive of emo aesthetics. Car crashes show up frequently, for example, in songs by Thursday ‘Understanding in a Car Crash' or Brand New ‘ The Quiet Things that Noone Ever knows'. Similarly Funerals can be imaginary as in Saves the Day's ‘At Your Funeral' or real but avoided as in Sorority Noise's ‘No Halo'. I argue that these topoi are more than just settings or events but abstract machines that intersect as key sites and events of emo expression.

Webpages and Basements are very different topoi as commonplaces which are more about how this music scene reached audiences. Taylor Markarian emphasises the role of the basement in emo scenes as a distinctly suburban location, neither garage nor club, facilitating DIY underage performances and audiences. The mall in contrast functioned more as a space of socialised consumption of both the music itself and clothing and accessories that could be acquired at stores like Hot Topic. MySpace and other early social media web pages functioned as key portals translating and transmitting the basement experience of the scene to a nationwide audience. Diaries are somewhere in between these lyrical thematic and scene commonplaces based topoi, following a circuit connecting up private diaries with confessional early social media and the confessional lyrics of emo groups themselves . I argue that to understand emo music and its significance fully requires an appreciation of these emo topoi as spaces, themes and commonplaces both real and virtual, socially located and psychic/imaginary, as well as their inter connections.

Dr Michael N. Goddard, is Reader in Film and Screen Media at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely on international cinema and audiovisual culture as well as cultural and media theory. He is also a media theorist, especially in the fields of media ecologies and media archaeology, as well as in digital media. In media archaeology, his most significant contribution is the monograph, Guerrilla Networks (2018), the culmination of his media archaeological research to date, which was published by Amsterdam University Press. His previous book, Impossible Cartographies (2013) was on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach and culminating in editing two books on noise, Reverberations (2012) and Resonances (2013). He is currently working on a book on the British post-industrial group Coil, and a new research project on genealogies of immersive media and virtuality.

Joseph Dodds: Ecopsychoanalytic cartographies of sound

Dr. Dodds is a practicing psychotherapist in private practice with two decades of clinical experience. He is a Senior Permanent Lecturer at AAU and also teaches at the University of New York in Prague, the Czech Psychoanalytical Society, the Prague Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, and the Centre for Leadership and Affective Neuroscience (C-LAN).

Alexander Matthias Gerner: Musical-social resonance diagrams of silence: Rethinking Deligny´s wandering lines gestures with psychosocial war/peace field switch (Kurt Lewin), and imaginary social vectors of the other´s attentional gaze

What can we find out about social resonances of lignes d’erre—‘wander lines’—as described by Deligny in relation to trajectories traced by the autistic children when linked to music, and silence? What are gestures of silence or insonor gestures in Deligny?

Observing gesture of silence is seen as the most important starting point of education(Deligny Ouvres p. 456) of understanding -as opposed to uncontrolled noise- something we have to learn, in a classroom situation in order to be able to learn – a beginning of learning from silence and even to access the other that is speechless, wordless but full of gestures and fragile wandering lines of silence– the child- the autist – the other that need silence in our gaze in order to openly meet its movement before entering in what we define as a social Champ de Batailhe of preformed gaze gestures.

Silence as a presemiotic diagram vector is also needed to start to draw lines with ink, besides the controlling gaze and demands of the other. While Brighenti & Kärrholm (2018) speak of “territoriology of rhythms“ this talk handles social resonance wandering and resonating lines, diagrams & maps starting with the phenomenological field based on Kurt Lewin first approach from 1917 in which a switch appears from peace to a champ de batailhe cartography in which an “area (…)-this is essential for the peace landscape-goes to infinity in all directions equally, even if it can progress differently fast and easily in different directions, depending on the formation and the terrain. The landscape is round, without front and back. But when one approaches the front zone, the extension into infinity no longer necessarily applies." Lewin, K. (1917), In this double notion of Lewin´s we introduce the attentional imagination of wandering eye vectors of the other imagined as “emitting” force or light: Do eyes resonate and even emit vectors of force/light in a social champ de batailhe? The counter-sensical notion of attentional emitting gaze agency causing effects on objects at a distance nevertheless has to be read within "the view that the sense of agency relies on causal inferences between actions and effects" (Recht & Grynszpan 2019). These thoughts will be cartographed in order to resonate with Deligny´s wandering lines cartographies and Deligny´s descriptions of wordless, almost soundless silent gestures.

cristina t. ribas and paul schweizer - kollektiv orangotango: Hydrocartography – figuring transformations

“Waters literally flow between and within bodies, across space and through time, in a planetary circulation system that challenges pretensions to discrete individuality.” (Chen et al, 2013). Even though, “waters are all too often made nearly invisible” (idem). Cartography can be continuously obsessed with the dry, static materiality of rocks, metals and concrete. An arid cartography. “A view of the world as seen by those who rule it” (Arturo Escobar, 2018), a vision that might erase or hide specific territories or modes of views. Since 2020, in public conversations and mapping workshops that we held at art schools - also as ways to reflect on our shared mapping practices between Europe and Latin America - , we have engaged with the idea of “becoming bodies of water” (Astrida Neimanis, 2017). Accordingly, we feel incited to understand our practice, coined by multiscaled dialogue as “mapping with water”, or as we rehearse to name it: hydrocartography. Hydrocartography, as committed to the creation of relations between diverse (territorial) experiences, identities and imaginations refuses to engage in the production of alleged static visualisations and, instead, seeks cartographic practices that are “engaged, embedded, embodied [...] in time, in space, in other bodies of other beings'' (Neimanis, 2017). If the waters that this world consists of flows through us, wouldn’t then be the only imaginably (im)possible way to map the world be to flow with them? That’s when the notion of ‘ecotone’ comes into play: a zone of confluence, a marker of connection or marker of difference. For Neinamis “an ecotone is also a zone of fecundity, creativity, transformation (…)”. Hydrocartography as committed to the creation of relations between diverse (territorial) experiences, identities and imaginations, needs to engage in developing new graphic expressions to represent these ecotones. We need to ‘figurate’ this world in transformation, the forces of the waters that swallow back into itself everything, or “when the sky is about to fall” (David Kopenawa & Bruce Albert, 2015). “Figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material–semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another”, writes Donna Hawaway (When Species Meet, 2008). We then propose to soak in not just the arid maps and its graphic elements, but the cartographers as well. This is, reject any pretension of a distanced view and, instead, accept that we are (becoming) in this together. Hydrocartography is to take a collective walk at the riverside. It is when neither the maps, nor ourselves stay the same, performing a watery movement. It calls us to engage in the “subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” (Haraway, 2008), to drift along the maps inside us, and to be(come) multicolored shades dripping, scrolling across the …

Bios

Cristina T. Ribas works as an artist and researcher, working with collective processes in academia and self-organized cartography and improvisation workshops. Post Doctoral researcher at PPGAV UFRGS (Porto Alegre, Brazil). She is part of the project Arquivos Táticos, alongside Giseli Vasconcelos and Tatiana Wells, and organises the open platform Desarquivo.org.

Paul Schweizer is a geographer and popular educator. As part of kollektiv orangotango he co-conducts collective art processes in public space. He co-edited ‘This Is Not an Atlas’ and curates the notanatlas.org platform. Currently he co-organizes collective mapping processes in Europe and Latin America in order to facilitate a global dialogue of critical cartographies.

Subhasree Biswas: THE FISHPOND AND OTHER ANECDOTES: Phenomenological mapping of space

In a contemporary world movements became a norm, but borders are increasingly difficult to cross, how do we define a ‘home’ or a ‘country’? Exile creates a possibility of multiple homes where ‘home’ becomes a fetish, a place of desire in a diasporic imagination. How do we draw the cartography of a space which is no longer a physical space but becomes another space; a heterotopic space of longing and belonging, a familiar sound, smell, colour, taste, and warmth. Thus, only a phenomenological mapping can best define such spatiality. Phenomenological maps are not a distinctive space but a tapestry of imagery weaving bonds between people and their surroundings. The fluidity of the phenomenological map embraces constant flow of emotions and imagination. A phenomenological map doesn’t cause a cartographic anxiety unlike the real ones where the regulation of borders increasingly

The essay will talk about phenomenological mapping of home and the country in the psych of Bangladeshis migrated after partition. Many of the migrated people never come into terms with the forceful uprootedness. People born in West Bengal but has Bangladeshi roots grew up with stories starts with evocative phrase “in our native home” which always referred to a village or a town in Bangladesh. Where there was always pond full of fishes, abundance of crops and fruits which can feed the entire village. There is a denial in accepting the current living space as ‘home’ or ‘country’ and considering it as a place in between coming and going back home. A nomadic space, a point of transit, this space Deleuze may call 'l'espace quelconque' 1 . In such a space an individual becomes depersonalized. Simultaneous homelessness and rootlessness cause lack of identity. The fishpond and the other anecdotes are common in the narratives of migrated Bengalis, in oral stories, in literature or in film. Although there is not sufficient evidence where the reality, myths, and fantasy amalgamated, but the collective memory gives an imagery of greener pasture and adobe of peace from pre-partition days. Whereas while working at the Danish Red cross, I often encountered the imagery of ‘home’ and ‘country’ became dystopian in the mind of Bangladeshi asylum seekers. Then the inquiry arises why, how, and when the phenomenological mapping of greener and adorable ‘home’ and ‘country’ became bleak from the psych of Bangladeshis?

Subhasree Biswas is a visual artist, researcher, educator, and designer. She is an Artivist, passionate about climate change, environmental justice, equality, and refugee problems. Her recent research interest focuses on feminism, anticapitalism, extended epistemology, spatiality and psychopower. Subhasree’s background in design and visual art helps her to think out the box and incorporate speculative fabulation, design thinking, co-design, storytelling (visual & oral) for impact and change in pursuit of a better world.

Myna Trustram: Writing out the Wind: A prerequisite for eagerness to gather in

One of the first contemporary artworks that I kept returning to was Emma Kay’s ‘The World from Memory, 3’ (1999). It is a map of the entire world that she drew from what she could remember of it. Another map that I also keep using is the Ordnance Survey map of the White Peak in Derbyshire, England. In this ‘experiential intervention’ I will focus on the top left-hand corner of the latter map: twenty-four square kilometres of hills, fields, woods, streams, farms and moorland on the westerly edge of the Peak District.

One day as I returned home from Windgather Rocks, the highest point in the area, I decided to take in turn each kilometre square of the map and to list all the names that are printed on that square and then organise them into a grid of only words. Later, I went on to remove all words from the map itself.

In the piece I will attempt to understand from a psychosocial perspective this urge to dismantle and rework the map. I appeared to want to un-map both the space and my mind, in the forlorn hope of being productively in a space emptied of human presence and language, in an empty or emptied space of nothing. The work is primarily literary, aesthetic, experiential, it does not engage directly with cartographical theory, neither does it address directly the political issues referred to in the brief. What it does do is engage psychoanalytic and psychosocial understandings of loss and emptiness outside of a therapeutic setting. Its potential merit might lie in its exploration of an impulse which made little cognitive sense but promised some aesthetic and developmental gain – insight even - if pursued.

D.W. Winnicott’s paper, ‘Fear of Breakdown’ (1974) influences the analysis and Emma Kay’s map is also a guide in its disregard for correct interpretations of boundaries, and a faith in the work of remembering, however inaccurate.

The ‘intervention’ will consist of a reading of a short text with a few images.

Biography: Myna Trustram I have worked in England for many years as a historian, curator and academic. In 2021 I left paid work in institutions and now focus on writing. I mostly write experimental essays in which I call upon literary and academic forms to consider themes such as loss and separation. I have publications which use psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies to think about loss and about museum collections. One current project is about young children’s experience of hospital stays in the 1950s.

Anthony Faramelli: Digital Cartographies: Gaming and the Fascist Abject

This paper will attempt to map the digital unconscious and how the architecture of the Internet impacts the formation of subjectivity. It will focus on Guattari’s reformulation of Lacan’s concept of Objet petit a and, reading that through the thought of Julia Kristeva, explore how desire is cut off from the mind in digital space, mutating into what I, along with Imogen Piper, term the fascist abject. This exploration will be grounded in an analysis of gaming culture and the alt-right.

Anthony Faramelli is a psychosocial practitioner and researcher. He is a reflective practice facilitator and a lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Anthony is also on the Executive Board of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis. He is the Author of Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics. He is currently writing a monograph provisionally titled The Mass Psychology of Fascism in the Age of Machines.

Robert A. Gorny: Mapping Socio-Techno-Environmental Assemblages

The paper takes a more posthuman perspective to stress the centrality of the built environment and related arts in the mapping of psychosocial processes. Starting from a brief recapitulation of Simondon’s distinctions between bio-social and psycho-social processes, the paper problematises to what degree a focus on (psycho)sociogenic processes (in space) may invite meso-reductionist accounts that — as DeLanda warned — reify social praxis as the ultimate level of reality.

Next to sociogeny there must be technogeny, Patricia Reed recently argued with the work of Bernard Stiegler. In extending Guattari’s Three Ecologies (environmental, social, and mental) into a three-stranded genealogical method, Stiegler’s work convincingly demonstrates how (different) technics form the conditions of (different) forms of psychosocial life, for which he prefers the term ‘noetic life’ to denominate forms of life that evolved with (and is sustained by) means other than life.

From this technologically-extended ‘sympoietic’ angle, my architecture-theoretical account then problematises a longstanding container conception of space within especially the French and English-speaking humanities and social sciences, wherever psychosocial aspects are conceived or studied ‘in’ space. Space is not merely (socially) shaped; it also shapes societies through different techno-environmental relationships. In line with a number of sociologists (like Löw, Delitz, Sievert, Angerer) who center on affective relations, I argue that this efficacy must be sought in a certain ‘phase space’ that is configured within the transversal and transductive relations across socio-techno-environmental assemblages, and the ‘space of possibilities’ associated with them.

The paper then elaborates — in coupling Stiegler’s theory of technical co-evolution to both Rosi Braidotti’s cartographic notion of affective ‘figurations’ and Karen Barad’s material-discursive notion of ‘apparatus’ — a particular method for mapping

the so-called ‘epiphylogenetic’ processes that characterize techno-mediated evolutions. 277 words

Bio

Robert Alexander Gorny is an architecture theorist, writer, and educator interested in a more machinic and ecosystemic understanding of and approach to the built environment. A graduate of the State Academy of Arts, Stuttgart, and the Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, he currently teaches at the Chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination, TU Delft. After recently completing his doctoral thesis ‘A Flat Theory: Towards a Genealogy of Apartments, 1540–1752,’ he is currently outlining a research program that extends its underlying assemblage-theoretic approach towards a general organology of built environments.

Benjamin Jenner: A WALK IN AFTERNOON SUNSHINE

This fine art, practice-led presentation will offer the ontology of blindfolded navigation as a means of compounding word and world.

How might the spatial and temporal qualities of poetic form be utilised as a framework upon which to conduct a blindfolded exploration of a forest? Specifically, how might Robert Grenier’s drawing poem AFTERNOON SUNSHINE (2004) be used as a form of bibliomantic divination, where letter forms operate as routes into and amongst the forest forms and the page display becomes a working diagram for embodied thought? How might the presentation space support a digital version of the blindfolded explorer’s response to this prompt, that draws on Grenier’s poem as a psychic re-presentation of the moment of exploration?

I am currently in the third year of a fine art, practice-led PhD at the University of Leeds where I am developing research into non-visual conceptions of space through touch, sound, and language. Recent research has shifted the project towards ecological thought and the interpretive possibilities blindfolded navigation might offer in this area. I am also interested in how blindfolded navigation might be used as a pedagogic form that productively destabilises the reification of established knowledge forms. Finding ways to present the research in writing, that retains something of the original ontology of the practice, is an ongoing concern and involves diagrams as well as other ontographic systems of display. I completed both my BA and MA in fine art painting, at Wimbledon School of Art (2004) and The Slade School of Fine Art (2009), respectively. I live and work in London, UK.

Ruta Putramentaite, Kundai Moyo and Lenka Vráblíková: Toward temporary communities: collective listening, walking, reading, breathing, and sounding

‘Toward temporary communities’ is an hour-long guided walk that seeks to provide embodied, creative and intellectual space to reflect on our relationship to ourselves, others and the world through collective practising of listening, walking, reading, (conscious) breathing and sound making. The walk draws from feminist and anti-colonial work on space and embodiment, bringing together various practitioners such as the experimental composer and musician Pauline Oliveros, Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, and scholar of black feminist geography Katherine McKittrick. By experimenting with these performative practices, we search for a framework that would enable us to experience ourselves in space as a shared body. Participants are invited to join us in this search in ways that feel comfortable to them.

Kundai Moyo is a Johannesburg based artist who uses her work as a tool for conducting sociological research. She is the co-founder of wherewithall (est. 2020), an online database of equipment, practical knowledge and research into independent curatorial practices in Johannesburg. Moyo is currently pursuing her Masters in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Ruta Putramentaite is an artist working in mediums of sculpture and performance. Her work is informed by a posthumanist philosophy and investigates what it means to be a human in the 21st century, stuck in between the accelerated technoscience and accelerated climate crisis. Ruta currently studies in the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, and is a member of a ecofeminist choir The Cooperative of Life (Sbor družstva život).

Lenka Vráblíková works at the intersection of visual culture studies with transnational feminisms, political ecology, and critical university studies, focusing particularly on questions related to embodiment and belonging. She is a lecturer at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and currently holds a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology.

Accessibility: This is a very easy walk (1km) for a group of max. 20 participants. The walk will start in the foyer of the Anglo-American University. Please register via a sign-up sheet.

Michaela Fiserová: Maps of Counter-Visuality

The article focuses on rhetorical biases in probative and non-probative illustrative use of photographs of events related to the COVID-19 pandemic. By revising Derrida’s deconstruction of event, I argue that reception of photography is conditioned by metonymical selection from the visible. Further, by following Butler’s theory of frames of war, I focus on moral frames of illustration of events: legitimate visuality selects photographs as metonymical evidence of events according to their ability to represent the collective memory. Finally, I compare this double metonymical framing to produsers’ metaphorical use of photographs in their memes and fake news. In relation to commented examples from Czech antivaxxer virtual scene, I revise Hall’s reception theory of encoding and decoding and Mirzeoff’s theory of countervisuality to compare them with performative reception of posts on social networks. The conclusion explains how to decode this metaphorical bias in produsage disseminating conspiracies and fake news.

Dr. Michaela Fišerová, Associate Professor, Metropolitan University Prague

Cole Robertson: Toward a unified field theory of photography

I’d like to present (and, if possible, install) my ongoing image cloud/mind map piece ‘Toward a unified field theory of photography’. ‘Toward…’ (seen here in a recent exhibition at Southwark Park Galleries) is a survey installation of my personal internal and external imagescapes; memes, family and found photographs, political images, and photographs I’ve taken are output as drugstore prints and connected with colour-coded tape lines directly on the wall.

This installation becomes a ‘map without a key’ - that is, a series of landmarks that are differentiated according to an unknown sorting mechanism. As viewers engage with the content of the images, however, associations emerge. The past two iterations of this piece have seen viewers engage with the content and accurately deduce many of the types of connections represented. The most recent versions of this piece were installed at Southwark Park Galleries in ‘Unruly Encounters’ and at the Kingston Museum as part of an LDoc-funded group exhibition titled ‘Another Land.’

I’m an artist/educator/writer currently living in London and lecturing at the University of Roehampton. My work takes photography as its subject - manifesting as digital sculpture, installation, fine printing, and writing - and has been exhibited and published internationally. I’m completing a PhD at the Royal College of Art in November.

Zoltán Kőváry: Taming the Inner Lands: Hungarian Painter Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka’s Journey from Traumatizing Waters to Friendly Landsacpes

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853-1919) was one of the most original painters of Central Europe in the turn of the 20th Century, whose talent was recognized much later by even Pablo Picasso. The emergence of Csontváry’s creativity was not conventional: he didn’t show the sign of talent until the age of 27, which in the case of fine arts is very rare. The signs of his giftedness and his commitment to artistic existence is related to a traumatic experience caused by the great flood of river Tisza a Szeged in the year 1879. Csontváry was there as a voluntary helper, but he was shocked by the sight of raging Mother Nature that he idolized before. First he showed the signs of depression, and later at his home he had an acoustic hallucination that told him that he was going to be an eminent painter. Csontváry interpreted that as a vocation from God, and after collecting enough money, he began his external and internal journeys to recreate himself as an artist in the name of God, looking for inspiration to find his grand themes walking the lands of the Mediterranean and Near East areas alone. In these years he painted large breathtaking works like „Baalbek” or „The Ruins of the Greek Theatre in Taormina” that contain unmistakeable colours of the „Napút” („Sun-way”). There are some psychiatric („pathographical”) interpretations of his art and fate that relate the specificities of Csontváry’s case to his mental illness, but in this approach I use another method called „psychobiography”. It is trying to find interrelations between the artist’s (inner) life-history, personality and life-work based on analyzing documents. I use psychoanalytic concepts to show that Csontváry’s regression that led to the emergence of his creative self was not accidentally caused by raging waters and Mother Nature, and to show how he could re-establish his bonds to Nature via artistic creativity by taming the external (and on parallel, the internal) lands by mapping the „transitional space” (Winnicott) creatively. I also use the object relations theory of Hungarian/British psychoanalyst Michael Balint, because his ideas about early object relational attitides (ocnophilia and philobatism) is primarily related to the management of external and internal spaces using different psychological tools including creativity.

Imogen Piper: Extremes of Machines

Extremes of Machines lays out a cartography of far-right extremification, topologically arranging the algorithmic, semiotic and psychical interplays that lead to the production of far-right content and subjects. The research interjects Guattarian semiotics into the schemas of Jaques Lacan, diagrammatically tracing the affect of algorithms and feedback loops on our subjective assemblages.

Imogen Piper is an open source researcher and visual investigator whose practice inquires into the psychosocial implications of new technologies. Her current research project ‘Semiologies of Extremification’ lays out a cartography of far-right extremification, diagrammatically arranging the algorithmic, semiotic and psychical interplays that lead to the production of far-right content and subjects.

Bio

Imogen is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths University and holds an MA in Research Architecture. She currently works as an Investigator at Airwars where she uses visual and forensic methodologies to investigate instances of civilian harm in conflicts.

Jacob Johanssen: The manosphere between destruction and desire

Drawing on my recently published book (Johanssen 2022), this talk discusses some online communities of the so-called manosphere (a collection of anti-feminist and misogynist groups, websites and fora). I present data from the incel, MGTOW and NoFap communities and argue that their members present contradictory thoughts, desires and fantasies about women which include but also go beyond misogyny. They are in a state of dis/inhibition: torn between (un)conscious forces and fantasies which erupt and are defended against. Dis/inhibition shows itself in self-victimization and defensive apathy as well as toxic agency and expresses itself in desire for and hatred of other bodies. Based on the work of Sigmund Freud, Klaus Theweleit and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, I show how sexuality, racism and images of the white male body shape the fantasies of many men on the internet and beyond. It may be difficult to see any hope, solutions or ways of change within those discourses. Yet, I show how a psychoanalytic perspective can help us to see the underlying desire for recognition and love that many of those men have.

Bio

Jacob Johanssen's research is influenced by media and communication studies, psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, philosophy and critical theory. He is Associate Professor in Communications and researches how individuals are (un)consciously shaped by and in turn shape digital media.

He is the author/editor of six books and two special issues. His most recent publications include two monographs: Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibtion (Routledge) and Event Horizon: Sexuality, Politics, Online Culture, and the Limits of Capitalism (Zer0 Books) written together with Bonni Rambatan.

Toby Austin Locke: Cartographies of Conspiracy: Mystical Mapping, Joining the Dots, and the Mythic Politics of Conspiracy Theory

Abstract

The contemporary wave of digitally facilitated and mediated conspiracy theories can be situated in a long history of mystical cartographies which seek to uncover the true nature of reality. For millennia people have developed esoteric practices and technologies of mapping to allow them to engage with the mysteries of existence. From Manichaean cosmologies of light and darkness and Kabbalist orderings of divine emanations to alchemical processes of transmutation and Gnostic awakening, people have constructed practices, technologies, mythologies, and cultural systems to not only come to understand the mysteries of existence, but to also attain new forms of consciousness and capacities for action and comprehension. It is in relation to such traditions of mystical cartography that contemporary conspiracy theory needs to be thought as a shadow of Enlightenment thinking brought into disjunctive synthesis with mystical dimensions of human experience and mediated through a technological domain itself run through with mythic resonances. Such a positioning of conspiratorial thought has important implications for how we come to understand the psychosocial, anthropological, and sociological status of contemporary digitally mediated conspiracy theory. Through such a positioning I will outline an understanding of contemporary digitally mediated conspiracy theories as engaged in processes of de/reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari 1994; 2004; 2011; Guattari 2013) and the creation of new psychosocial, existential, and anthropological territories.

Bio

Toby Austin Locke received his PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths College in 2019. His thesis was an ethnography of an anarchist social centre in London with a particular focus on the concept of the commons and commmoning. He has also written on the philosophy of death and the non-living (Repeater Books 2016). His current research focuses on digital technology, conspiracy theory and decentralised networks from an anthropological and psychosocial perspective. He currently teaches Cultural Politics at the University of Roehampton and has previously taught in psychosocial studies, criminology, sociology, and anthropology at Birkbeck, LSBU and Goldsmiths.

David Jones: On the Border: A Psychosocial History of ‘Borderline Personality

The diagnosis of ‘borderline personality disorder’ has emerged as a paradoxical and contentious diagnosis. Over the past couple of decades it has become one of the most commonly used diagnoses in the psychiatric lexicon and has even entered popular discourse. This is remarkable for a diagnosis that did not exist before the 1930s and only entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980. However, it remains hotly contested receiving trenchant criticism from within the psy-professions and from without.

This paper will explore some aspects of the history of this diagnosis. The diagnosis itself very evidently emerges from a spatial metaphor with roots in psychoanalytic jargon as being on the border with psychosis. It is less understood how this was a diagnosis that emerged on the margins of different disciplines, when the boundaries between disciplines were more blurred than is often remembered. This paper will trace some of the roots of the diagnosis in some of the social and economic anxieties and tumult of the 1930s, particularly marked in Great Britain. These reflections can help us understand both its popular appeal and its problematic status. Borderline was forged initially as a transdisciplinary diagnosis, but in losing that complexity it has become much more problematic. The diagnosis now speaks of the dynamics of exclusion, never quite belonging and often disparaged by both the users and receivers of the diagnosis. It lives somehow on territory between the clinic and the asylum, between neurosis and psychosis, between the prison and the community.

Bio

Dr David W Jones: is based at the Open University, UK. He is Joint Editor of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies. He has long standing interests in issues of mental health and the development of psychosocial perspectives. He is particularly interested in the border between issues of mental health and criminal justice. Books include Understanding Criminal Behaviour: Psychosocial Approaches to Criminality (Willan/Routledge 2008). The second edition of this book, with new chapters on 'Public Violence and Terror' and ''Race' and Crime' was published in 2020. He examines the 200 year old history of the various diagnoses of moral insanity, psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder in: 'Disordered Personalities and Crime: An analysis of the history of moral insanity' (Routledge 2016).

Hannah Dee: It’s A Good Home Ain’t It? Memoires of Broadmoor

Memory, Rebecca Solnit suggests, is ‘unimaginable without physical dimensions,’ since ‘to imagine it as a physical space is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached.’ I am currently writing a memoir centred on the experiences of a family member who was detained in high-secure psychiatric institutions (Broadmoor, Ashworth and Rampton) between 1972-2002 and whom I visited throughout my childhood. As part of my investigations into our respective memoires and experiences of these institutions, my uncle and I have been journeying back to these places, finding and viewing photographs, building plans, and maps.

This paper will present a series of short creative writing fragments reflecting on the physical dimensions of Broadmoor and exploring the different ways carceral power may be exerted, reproduced, and contested through them. The imposing Victorian gate, red brick walls and turret clock, have for decades served as the media’s favoured images of Broadmoor - long after those buildings were decommissioned. This work is interested in what happened in the direct encounters of inmates and their visitors with these symbolic places and how approaching the locations kept behind the walls, might illuminate something of the hidden history of Broadmoor’s populations – from the once expansive gardens where friendships between inmates were tended; to the admission block roof where a red flag was once raised in protest at patient abuse.

Bio

Hannah Dee is PhD student at QMUL and has a background in justice campaigns, organising against state violence and in defence of the right to protest.

Sebastian Birch: The Body and Cartographies of Self-Harm

Deliberate self-harm is a sub clinical event that as a mental health nurse I have encountered almost every day of my clinical career. However, the understanding of the phenomena I find to be lacking in the clinical world. Freud (1900) states that dreams are the “royal road” to the unconscious, but what use is the unconscious alone for a subject that is embodied? How are we to conceptualise self-harm? I argue that self-harm can be conceptualised as the cartography of distress. The bodies “royal road”.

Why is the body important for this study? The clinical interventions for self-harm are psychological. They focus on the intensity of emotions and the control of these. There is very little work to look at the body itself in this process; frankly there is a paucity of interest in the body. So, I ask again, why is the body important for this study?

Firstly, and rather obviously, we are looking at the clinical act of self-harm. We can theorise self-harm as the spilling out of the psychical onto the physical, onto the body. The body becomes a map of the mental, it charts, historicises and records moments of intensity. Descartes makes his distinction between the mind and the body; self-harm destroys the distinction. So, the choice to leave the body out of the discourse of its own cartography means we miss out on an integral part of the self-harm process. Areas of harm are chosen, quite rationally, to denote and communicate. The areas join and move with the inner states of intensity. Developing a deeper conceptual understanding of these maps will further our understanding of the whole phenomena and if we were so inclined, help to develop future interventions.

This paper will utilise the works of Guattari (2012) and Deligny (2014) to construct a theory, or at least to sketch a theory, of a cartography of self-harm. It will highlight the importance of the body in therapeutics and aim to redress the logocentrism of mind over body in self-harm therapeutics. As we put the two together as a binary it becomes abundantly clear that mind and body are not opposed but are engaged in constant dialogue.

Bio

Sebastian Birch (RMN, FHEA) is a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing

Sebastian Birch: The Body and Cartographies of Self-Harm

Bio

Sebastian Birch (RMN, FHEA) is a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing

Janna Graham: Living lines: conjunctural cartographies in/as institutional analysis

Bio

Janna Graham is a practice-based researcher who has worked in the field of the curatorial for nearly twenty years, occupying long term positions at institutions such as Whitechapel, Serpentine Galleries (London), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham) and developing projects for Plymouth Arts Centre, Project Arts Centre (Dublin) Vanabbemusum (Netherlands), the New Museum (New York) and documenta (Kassel) among others. A key figure in what has been termed ‘the educational turn’ in curating, she has developed exhibitions, residencies, research and writing at the intersection of art and contemporary social urgencies including the struggles around migration, gentrification, education, anti-racism and indigeneity. Janna is also a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis

Andrew Goffey

Bio

Andrew Goffey is an Associate Professor in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies and a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis. His work is on the grey areas between media, philosophy, science and technology studies and politics. He has published widely on the work of Felix Guattari, Jean Oury, software studies, and media philosophy. He is also a translator of multiple books including Lines of Flight and Schizoanalytic Cartographies by Félix Guattari. Andrew is also a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis.

Rachel Wilson: Mapping Support: The Pedagogic Filmic Practice of

Sebastian Birch: The Body and Cartographies of Self-Harm

Bio

Sebastian Birch (RMN, FHEA) is a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing

Andrew Goffey

Bio

Rachel Wilson: Mapping Support: The Pedagogic Filmic Practice of

Andrew Goffey

Bio

Rachel Wilson: Mapping Support: The Pedagogic Filmic Practice of Fernand Deligny

Fernand Deligny’s work alongside autistic youth sought to unravel the institutional power still prevalent in schools, asylums and prisons following the Second World War. The French occupation left him critical of processes of naming and categorization, and ultimately disinterested in cause of autism. In the The Cévennes network, overlapping practices of drawing and filmmaking were put to work in generating spaces that would facilitate exploration and autonomy.

Mapping as drawing a practice undertaken by ‘close presences’, or those working closely alongside children, followed the routes and derivations of children as they moved unhindered through the landscape. These ‘wander lines’, point to curiosity rather than the imposition of neurotypical structures and their associated incarceration and punishment, and to a difference articulated in Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateau’s between mapping and tracing. ‘What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real […] tracing always involves an alleged “competence”. The parallel endeavor to document life in film as a collective undertaking meant embedding a practice that raises questions of creativity, pedagogy, governance, and support.

Drawing on work in mental health supported accommodation in London, where self/representation in the third sector is often undertaken amidst context of ‘story telling’ for funding or promotional purposes, this paper unpicks the pragmatics of such a practice as it seeks to create a commonality and challenge expectations. In contexts in which power relations between those on either side of a supportive dyad are irrevocably unequal, it asks, what is at stake in the difference between pre-determined and contained creative projects and something like the ‘Deligny approach’.

Bio

Rachel Wilson is a Recovery Coordinator in an accommodation service for people with high support mental health needs operated by the charity SHP. As a researcher, Rachel’s work is situated at the intersection of radical forms of psychotherapy, aesthetics, filmmaking and the histories of institutional analysis. She is currently conducting her doctoral studies in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. Rachael is also a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis.

Carolyn Laubender: Empires of Mind

This article analyzes the extensive archive of artwork produced by Melanie Klein’s child-patient ‘‘Richard’’ in Narrative of a Child Analysis. Focusing specifically on Richard’s drawings of what he called ‘‘The Empire,’’ I explore the geopolitical significance of these images by using postcolonial theory to show how they bring the midcentury politics of imperial expansion into the clinical relation. Throughout this article, I consider how the Empire drawings speak to the entanglement of psychic life with social history and contend that their abstract, non-representational aesthetic engages in a nuanced critique of imperialism. Taking Richard’s drawings as more than mere child’s play, I read them as providing an opening through which to visualize the decolonial political potentiality of the clinic.

Bio

Carolyn Laubender, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the B.A. in Childhood Studies at the University of Essex. She also serves as the Book Reviews Editor for Psychoanalysis & History. Her writing has appeared in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Arizona Quarterly, Psychoanalysis & History, Free Associations, and Feminist Theory, among others. Her current monograph project, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Clinic, draws on an archive of clinical psychoanalytic encounters from midcentury Britain and its (post)colonies to theorize how the clinic constitutes an innovative realm of political action.

Susan Kelly: Turning: a Micropolitical Cartography of Colonial Rehabilitation

In colonial spaces, what was the territorial function of ‘turning’ fighters during counter-insurgency campaigns? How did practices of rehabilitation in British counterinsurgency ‘pipelines’ in Malay and Kenya in the 1950s model this practice of turning and reorienting individuals? This paper will explore a colonial genealogy of rehabilitation as a set of coercive practices that aimed to produce individuated, moral subjects who would become loyal to the state. It will explore how this ‘turning’ was crucial not only for specific military operations, but also for producing the legitimacy of the British colonial state and reintegrating territory into the Imperial space. The paper speculates on links to contemporary practices of turning, from its use in the UK government’s Prevent programme which continues to use a medical rehabilitation framework in practices of racist political profiling and coercion, to specific actions such as Paul Golding (leader of far-right group Britain First) turning his back on Sadiq Khan during his mayoral victory speech in London in 2016. It examines these colonial relationships between space, subjectivity and notions of loyalty to show how they persist in the present and how they might be un-made.

Bio

Susan Kelly is a writer, artist, organiser and educator. Her research the relationships between art and micropolitics: where the production of subjectivity becomes a crucial site for analysing and intervening in the reproduction of capitalism, imperialism, art and culture. Susan has worked in performance, video, installation, drawing, and public / site-based intervention. More recently, she has been focused on writing and co-producing workshops and research processes using various forms of participatory militant investigation. Susan is also a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis

Sarover Zaidi: Carceral bodies, barricade cities, and the horizons of protest

When do bodies become out of place, or when do they become archipelagos of carcerality? What legitimises the presence of some bodies over others? Living in a intensely carceral and right wing communal state in India, my work traverses the folds of identity politics, contested citizenship, and the new governmentalities of the Indian state. The state attempts to erase, arrest, harass, and barricade people, based on their religious identity and political affiliations and the resistance to the government and it's ideologies and schemes.

I explore this idea through different locations. In the city of Bombay, the 'Muslim' get's set in a chain of signifiers, namely the outsider, the terrorist, the rioter, the anti-national forming a metonymic chain, contrasted and highlighted heavily by the then right wing ruling party, the Shiv Sena . The Shiv Sena emerged as a Hindu right wing political party at the time and was involved in orchestrating the riots and looting in Muslim neighborhoods. If neighborhoods bear the weight of these historical events of the city, then bodies participate in this narrative through everyday locations of living with violence. The city functions as a doppelganger on itself, with different sets of rules applying to different areas, and of course to different religiously affiliated communities. This format of carcerality is played out most intensely on the body itself.

My second fold in this is based on fieldwork in an area of Delhi, which experienced intensive state sponsored violence and rioting in 1984, and yet there is no marker/memory of this allowed by the state. The 1984 Sikh pogrom, spread across Delhi with loss of property, and life for the Sikh communities. Yet today there has been a clean erasure of this archive from the cities’ memory. I attempt to explore how memory too can be locked up or locked away, when the state does not wish to recall it's own formats of violence and erasure.

Interestingly I conclude this work, with research undertaken at two sites of protest that grew on two highways of Delhi against government laws pertaining to citizenship, and farming regulations. The Shaheen Bagh protests, led my Muslim women, blocked out a highway for about two months, and also triggered protests across the country. Evoking then the questions 'Is protest the only apparatus left that can march in the street, create the street and hold together a floundering democracy?' What are the forms of resistance and life, do people undertake, to re-render and generate new horizons to their carceral everyday?

George Dake: Map-making as a Psycho-social method: The Everyday lives and lived experiences of men who sell sex to other men

Selling sex carries levels of precarity. It is often on the edges of criminality, structural inequalities, and harm. Research with men who sell sex to other men (MSSM) is an exploration of and attempts at understandings of a world that is simultaneously private and public. MSSM weave between address past and present vulnerabilities, and the recollection and processing of difficult memories. The scope for uneasiness, anxiety-driven performances, unconscious defensiveness and discomforts for participant and researcher alike is great. Mitigating and/or minimising this anxiety and defensiveness is important for building trust, as is privileging creative and innovative methods which enable participants to communicate their experiences as part of the knowledge generation process.

The Psycho-socio approaches to research is an attitude that promotes different ways of working with people, and prioritises methodologies which provide opportunities for dialogue, and questions the ambiguities and ambivalences that research participants confront in their experiences (Clarke & Hoggett, 2018). There is a deliberate focus on the importance of acknowledging the unconscious and emotional dynamics and their role in the construction of realities (Beedell, 2018).

In this session, I present map-making as a psycho-social method. Drawing on my PhD study on the everyday lives and lived experience of men who sell sex, I reflect on map-making as:

An ‘inter-subjective third’ element (providing opportunities for scaffolding anxiety and defensive performances in face-to-face researcher-participant interactions in sensitive research) difficult and personal discussions
An innovative and creative data collection method enabling a multi-dimensional approach (including non-linguistic, visual, affective, and sensory) to eliciting experience, especially experiences of vulnerable participants that does not lend itself to easy articulation via words or verbalisation.
A mediation tool in eliciting personal, intimate, and difficult narratives. They represent both discursive possibilities but also attempts to understand, including the unconscious.

Eric Harper: On the inability to sleep

We are sleep walking with and into the acceleration force fields of complexity which struggle to interface with other fields of complexity. Inter facing with other faces (Levinas) and unconscious minds (Bateson) requires recognition and reflexively. Recognition is to come to the support of life, whilst reflecting requires the transversality of relationships.

Thinking alongside Guattari and Fanon this presentation will transverse the Lacanian Bromean knott by looking at how the intersectionality of one to one, group and community relationships produces resistance, recognition and reflection.

Two examples will be provided. Human rights defence with sex workers and young people engaged in survival sex in Africa. Psychologically informed reflective practice in homeless and mental health projects in London.

Steven Trapp: Making New Maps

Cartography of the world and colonialism is an effort to territorialize the entire earth. Individuals are born into a world that they might perceive as completely mapped and dominated in it’s entirety. As such, there is an inherent acceptance of panopticism. Individuals inhabit and accept living in a space they believe to be fixed and known it’s entirety. There is a built in presumption that this is the natural unchangeable state of reality.

I’m interested in the consequences of cartography and panopticism on the local level and its relation to mental health. One grows up in a region that has been completely mapped into city, suburb, farmland, nature preserve, state park. We may not have stepped foot in the neighborhood on the other side of town or the nature preserve 45 minutes away but we know where it is on a map and we have places of comparison. The result can be a conclusion that there is nothing new to experience. There is then a boredom, an acceptance and adoption of a belief that we are unable to reterritorialize the world around us - an acceptance of the panopticism ingrained in society influencing our ability to make our own maps. The belief that there is nothing new to explore, nothing to learn, contributes to boredom and leads to a repression of desires, and ultimately the eruption of desire in negative forms, potentially schizophrenia and psychotic behavior.

Individuals can break free of the panoptic cartographies imposed upon them. The act of getting lost in our local environs can be a positive process of deterritorialization and growth. To wander to a new area and inhabit a new space can be illuminating and provoking - to make new maps and stumble upon new stimuli.

For many, international travel is used in this way. However, for the 20 year-old struggling with serious mental health issues travel is not realistic. Can the process of getting lost in our local environments be used as a therapeutic process to empower the individual to challenge the presumptions that cartography imposes upon them? Does the experience of new allow us to rearticulate memories and deal with causes of psychotic/schizophrenic behavior? Can the individual apply the process of reterritorializating local cartography and breaking free of the panopticism of cartography to their own mental health issues?

Bryce Maxwell: ‘This Book a Bone Bird’ – A Case Study (Experiential Discussion)

NF is non-verbal, 19-years of age and was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder when he was 4. At 9 years old, he was removed from his parents’ custody on allegations of neglect and currently resides in a group home. Upon receiving him into my care as his primary instructor, the narrative that had come to surround NF was one predominated by his history of self-injury, his inconvenient vocalizations, and his unwillingness to work. Since NF is able to read and write (albeit in a fragmented way), I presented him with a compositional notebook (Guattari’s Monograph of RA) as a means for communication and self-expression. Over the past three years, instances of self-injury and aggression have decreased and become uncommon. As a result, we have had the opportunity to broaden NFs territory of efficacy by branching out into the public on Community Based Instruction (CBI) opportunities, where I have mapped and catalogued NFs comings and goings (much how Deligny did at Monoblet).

Because of the sheer amount of experiences that NF and I have had, I cannot offer an exhaustive, sequential presentation of the progress here (although I am currently drafting a book for this purpose), but I would like to share a handful of experiences that I hope will encourage thought and conversation on the broader sociopolitical landscape that these experiences are immersed in.

Bio

Bryce Maxwell is a teacher – ESE Self-Contained, Therapeutic Unit for Behaviors

Susanna Kass: Individual and collective cartographies of environmental knowledge

In navigating the world and understanding our environment, we draw on and blend many different types of knowledge. Personal experience, scientifically determined facts, narrative devices and socially agreed meanings all play a role in how we interpret our surroundings. In this workshop we would use individual and collective cartographic exercises to map and reflect on the variety of different sources and resources we draw upon to make sense of objects and phenomena in our surroundings.

This exercise is part of my PhD research, which looks at how changing semiotic technologies (after Donna Haraway) affect our situated environmental knowledge. In this project I am developing a methodology of cartographic mapping practices in dialogue with Felix Guattari’s framework of The Three Ecologies. The three registers of the subjective, social and environmental offer a way to conceptualise how environmental knowledge is distributed in subjective experience, social systems and material reality. My research is focused on mapping the grammars of processes and practices involved in shaping environmental knowledge with the help of material and immaterial communication tools. In the different registers, these grammars manifest as unstable (subjective), stabilised (social) and (relatively) stable (environmental. The research aims to map how individuals and groups who work to expand their environmental knowledge through their practice (artists, activists and researchers) use and develop new semiotic technologies to engage with the environment.

In the workshop we will attempt to individually observe and describe the cognitive and creative processes which are activated when we engage in observation and reflection. This will be followed by sharing and discussion about the resulting individual maps. The final part consists of a collective mapping exercise where we would draw on our own individual knowledge toolbox to create a collective map of an object or process present in our surroundings.

The workshop would preferably be held outside or in a public space where there is the possibility to observe stimuli external to the group. The estimated time to complete the exercise is 45 mins to 1 hour (depending on discussion length.

Bio

Susanne Kass is a PhD researcher in Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University. Her current research is focused on how changing semiotic technologies are changing situated environmental knowledge. She holds a Master of Arts in conceptual practices from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts and Master and Bachelor degrees from Novia University of Applied Sciences.